The company, named after founder Mark Pahlow’s eccentric great uncle, has been shipping strange objects, offbeat toys and slightly off-color gifts from its Seattle headquarters since 1983.

Wired visited Archie McPhee‘s retail store, in Seattle’s earnestly funky Wallingford neighborhood. It’s like a warehouse full of carnival toys. If you’ve ever failed to throw a ping-pong ball into the right cup of water and received a strange, almost worthless finger puppet as a consolation prize, you might recognize it in one of the many bins here.

Before the internet and eBay, Archie McPhee was a precious source of bizarre gags from around the world. My future parents-in-law got the catalog and cackled while showing me such oddities as a telescoping fork (expands up to 2 feet!), rubber cockroaches, boxing plastic Godzillas and catapult guns that fling plastic bugs, giving me an early hint of the madness that I would someday marry into.

The McPhee catalog strikes a chord with a certain kind of person: children, or those with a particularly goofy sense of humor. If your sense of fun veers between silly and absurd, you’re a likely customer for McPhee’s brand of plastic fantastic humor.

Like most great works, Archie McPhee was born out of a desperate need.

“Having been born and raised in Ohio, I understand boredom in a profound way,” says Pahlow in his memoir,Who Would Buy This? (available for sale at Archie McPhee for $19.95).

To assuage the tedium of his childhood, he went into business, starting by selling illegal firecrackers to his friends. Later, he collected and resold stamps, cigar box labels, old toys and Korean rubber acupuncture figurines.

Pahlow bought up strange objects and odd lots on road trips through out-of-the-way Midwestern towns, then sold them at huge markeups to emporia in New York. Eventually he opened his own shop and started publishing a catalog, gradually adding products of his own design to the mix.

Now Archie McPhee sells hundreds of original products under its own brand.

The “secret,” if you can call it that, is simple.

Thanks to the miracle of inexpensive Asian manufacturing, any object, no matter how strange, can be mass-produced in plastic for pennies per unit. Design some ironic packaging, wait for it to get off the boat from China, sell for $8.95 and repeat.

What makes it all work is Pahlow’s unique sensibilities: One-third goofy humor, one-third self-aware irony, one-third crass commercialism, all salted with a strange sense of mission.

“I came to realize shopping existed to help make people less depressed,” Pahlow writes, “and I was determined to help them in this noble undertaking.”

Above: Archie McPhee created the Devil Duckie in 2000, and it quickly went on to become a nationwide cult hit, spawning dozens of variations. $8.95 for a sleeve of six.

Like multicore computer chips, Android smartphones, and Starbucks coffee, LCD TVs are getting cheaper—and bigger—all the time. Inevitably, your brother-in-law’s new 55-inch TV cost less than the 48-inch model you bought two years ago. Why? Science! See, flat-panel displays are made by machines that print arrays of circuits on sheets of glass and then slice those sheets into screens like high tech brownies. And since 1999, those machines have increased in size by 800 percent. Thus, the Law of Big Glass: The larger the glass printer, the cheaper—or bigger—the TV.

In 1993, the industry-standard tool for “printing” display circuitry, a TFT-LCD deposition machine, could work with glass no bigger than about 18 inches square. Today, they can handle sheets that are 11 feet on a side—the size of a garage door—and just a millimeter thick. A 20-inch flatscreen TV cost $1,200 in 1999; it costs just $84 today.

The law applies to organic LED displays, too—which is great, since they’re brighter and more energy-efficient than LCDs. OLED screens use a related manufacturing process, and right now they’re printed on 4 x 5-foot sheets. But the Law of Big Glass says 55-inch OLEDs will someday go for less than $1,000 at Costco. By then you’ll probably want a tiny, ridiculously expensive holodeck.

My phone is about as integrated into my life as my left temporal lobe. I’m not going running without it.

That’s why the H2O Audio Amphibx Fit Armband ($60) is a boon for technophile exercise-junkies like me. Sure, it’s ugly, and its large size dwarfs my skinny arms. But with my phone tucked inside, I can go running in rain, sleet, hail or any other ridiculous elements without fear of water damage. I can even go swimming with my Precious — something even Sméagol would envy.

Coupled with a pair of H2O Audio’s Surge 2G headphones ($50), which are also waterproof, I can listen to music anywhere I choose to run, splash or ride.

The Amphibx armband is essentially a sealed, clear plastic pouch attached to a beefy fabric-fastener strap. On the back there’s a double-latching hatch with a gasket. Pop your phone inside, clip the latches down and the gasket seals all water out. It also seals air inside, so your phone gets to ride along with a bubble of air, which helps it float should it become detached.

You can still work your phone’s controls and use its touchscreen through the pouch, although it’s a bit more awkward than before.

To use headphones, you connect the armband’s internal plug to your device before sealing it inside, then close up the pouch. Afterward, you can plug your earbuds or headphones (regular or waterproof) into the armband’s external headphone port, making an electrical connection without compromising the waterproofing.

I tested the Amphibx armband and Surge 2G headphones in a variety of conditions, from jogging on a hot and sweaty California afternoon to running through chilly, blowing Seattle rain. I took it in the shower and on 1-mile pool lap swims. I used it with an iPhone 4 as well as a Motorola Defy. Neither phone ever saw a drop of water, except for the random few drops that fell on them as I was reopening the case after a workout.

The case is big enough to hold the well-endowed HTC Evo, although it’s a bit of a squeeze once you connect the internal headphone plug. You can also can fit a credit card or a $20 bill inside along with the phone.

The Surge 2G headphones performed just fine while running, with decent sound and a rugged design that made them relatively easy to deal with while exercising. However, I was not able to get the headphones to stay in while swimming. It might be that my ears are unusually-shaped, but they kept floating out in the water, even when I’d jammed them well inside my outer ear. Switching to different tips (several sizes are included) didn’t help much.

Still, for running and other sport activities in wet environments short of total immersion, the H2O Audio combination works well. Whether you just want to take music with you, can’t stand being out of touch or are using your phone to track your workouts, these two are a pricey but practical pair of accessories.

WIRED Waterproof to 12 feet: Good enough for surfing! Wide fabric-fastener strap keeps armband on even when severely buffeted. Easy to adjust.

TIRED Plastic sticks to touchscreens, making removal slow. Harder to work touchscreen controls through the plastic. Plastic adds glare in bright sunlight. Size will make your arms look even skinnier, you nerd.

Maybe — if you’re the kind of person who gets obsessed over logging every workout, tracking your pace and counting how many miles per week you’ve averaged. And if you’re that kind of person, there’s a host of apps and gadgets that can feed your mania for recording progress.

While they may not be making me a better runner, I am far more aware of how much (or little) I’m actually exercising, and that alone is a strong impetus to work out more and to do it better.

The apps show how a smartphone can turn into a collection point for an array of health and fitness data, including speed, distance, elevation, heart rate and other workout metrics such as calories and cadence (the measurement of steps or pedal strokes per minute). RunKeeper has also recently added the ability to track weight and even sleep patterns, with the right accessories.

Both MapMyRun and RunKeeper work similarly. When you start a workout, you launch the app and tell it what you’re about to do — run, walk, bike or swim. The app then measures how long you’re working out, records your path if it’s able to pick up a GPS signal, and records your heart rate if you’ve got a heart rate monitor. When you’re done, you press a button and your workout gets zapped up to the cloud, where you can view it and share it.

Both are available as free downloads for Android and iPhone, but to get the most out of these apps, you’ll need to spend some dough on a few extra gadgets. A heart-rate monitor is probably the most useful addition for exercise nuts, because it can tell you if you’re actually working out at the appropriate intensity.

For Android phones with Bluetooth support, chances are good you can use a Bluetooth heart-rate monitor. I used the Polar Wearlink+ ($80), which worked just fine. It paired with the phone, and the data was immediately available in both MapMyRun and RunKeeper.

If you’ve got an iPhone, you need a different solution, because the iPhone’s Bluetooth won’t work with the Polar Bluetooth adapter. Instead, I used Wahoo Fitness’s Fisica sensor key ($80), a small white tab that plugs into the iPhone connector port on the bottom of the phone. This adapter communicates wirelessly with any sensor that uses the Ant+ protocol, including Wahoo’s own heart-rate-monitor strap ($60). The combination is more expensive than a plain Bluetooth heart-rate strap: Yet another reason for your Android-loving friends to lord it over you.

Runkeeper can also integrate with weight data from the Withings Wi-Fi Body Scale, stride data from a Wahoo Stride Sensor ($80), and sleep and activity data from a Fitbit or Zeo device. I didn’t test these sensors, but it’s comforting to know that when I want to turn even more of my life into pure, clean numbers, it will be easy to do so.

Once the data’s in the cloud, you can view reports, of course, and also share it with your friends, either to boast about your accomplishments or to encourage one another to keep going — or maybe a little of both. And you can start to analyze trends: For instance, I log more miles on Saturdays than I do on Tuesdays. And I’m faster on my lunchtime runs than my early-morning, pre-breakfast runs.

Of the two services, Runkeeper has a cleaner, easier-to-read interface on both smartphones and its website. Runkeeper also offers voice prompts, which can tell you how far and how fast you’ve gone at various intervals.

Apart from the voice prompts, MapMyRun matches Runkeeper feature-for-feature, but I found it harder to navigate, and the website offers fewer options for slicing and dicing the data. It’s also got more advertisements in both the app and on the website (though you can pay to make the ads go away).

Both apps have free versions, but to make the most of both apps, you’ll need to pay something. Runkeeper offers “Runkeeper Elite” subscriptions for $5 per month or $20 per year. They offer real-time run tracking (so your friends can keep an eye on you as you run — including during races) and a wider variety of charts to analyze your performance trends.

MapMyRun offers various paid options ranging from $6 per month to $20 per month (or $30 to $100 per year), which give you access to additional advanced training charts and reports, and also eliminate ads from the interface.

After using both apps for months (in Runkeeper’s case, I’ve used it for years) am I a better runner? Probably, but it’s not because the data has given me superhuman self-coaching abilities. Rather it’s that the mere act of measuring my activity has made me pay more attention to it.

If I were a more serious runner or had a definite exercise goal like losing weight, these apps and gadgets would give me a valuable edge. As it is, they help me stay on track — and for now, that seems to be just what I need.

It’s a comfortable 63.3 degrees on the roof of Wired headquarters, with a slight 3-mph breeze, and the barometer is at 30.14 inches and rising.

A few blocks away, it’s 61.1 degrees and there’s a 4-mph breeze from the northwest. There was a little mist yesterday, 0.06 inches of precipitation to be exact.

And I know all this even though I’m 20 miles away and inside.

Welcome to the world of super-precise microclimate measurement. It’s all possible, thanks to the thousands of amateur weather stations installed all around the world, which are increasingly linked to the internet and to one another. Someday, this network might give me the ability to tailor weather forecasts not just to my town, but to the very block I’m on.

The Davis Vantage Pro2 we’re using to track the weather at Wired is one of the more expensive weather kits available, but its precision pays off.

Upstairs, there’s an array of environmental sensors, including a thermometer, an anemometer, and a rain gauge all house within an ugly but sturdy shell. We strapped ours to a metal pole about 12 feet above the roof of our office building.

It’s solar-powered and has enough battery power to last all night and through cloudy days, so you don’t need to run electricity to it. And it transmits data to the Vantage Pro2 console wirelessly, so you don’t need data cables either: Just find a suitable pole, strap it up there, and forget about it.

Downstairs, the console picks up data transmitted by the sensors and adds data gathered indoors, including indoor temperature and barometric pressure. You can stare at the console and watch its rudimentary graphs, but such data quickly grows dull for all but the most committed weather nuts. What you really want to do is upload that data to the internet.

It was a bit tricky to set up, so we first had to use the data logger to pipe the data to a nearby PC running the WeatherLink software to make sure the bits were flowing. Once that was working, we reconnected the data logger to the Ambient Weather module, which is connected directly to our cable modem’s router. From that point on, we didn’t need to use the PC any more.

Weather Underground, which loaned us the equipment, is building a network of weather-data-collecting nodes like ours. The company says it’s currently tracking around 13,400 sites in the United States and almost 20,000 worldwide. Many of those are accessible through Weather Underground’s website, which got a facelift on February 2 — Groundhog’s Day, of course — making it far easier to get information at a glance from its wealth of data.

Eventually, Weather Underground says it wants to use the data stream from each of these amateur weather stations to improve and hyper-localize official weather forecasts. For instance, if the data shows that your location is consistently 4 degrees warmer than the official forecast on summer afternoons, you could use that information to create a more precise forecast for everyone around you.

For now, such advanced features aren’t available — but you can browse through individual weather stations, including Wired’s, and see how conditions change from neighborhood to neighborhood. That’s like catnip for weather geeks.

It also has more immediate, practical implications. If you’re managing an office building like ours, having hyper-local data like this might help you create more efficient air-conditioning and heating schedules. If you have a vacation home, you could install a weather station there and be able to check on conditions before you hit the road on Friday afternoon.

Or, if you live in a part of the world with intensely variable microclimates, such as San Francisco, weather stations like these can help you decide how to dress for the office. That’s no small thing, when temperatures can vary by 10 or 20 degrees from one side of the city to the other.

WIRED Incredibly precise measurements of temperature, precipitation, barometric pressure, and wind speed and direction. Solar power and wireless transmission means no wires to connect. Expandable — plug UV and solar-radiation sensors into the station. Once set up, system transmits data seamlessly to Weather Underground.

TIRED Setup requires a great deal of patience, as it took us hours to find the right spot, secure the sensors, and set up the internet connection using a data logger. Wireless connection sometimes dropped depending on where we put the console. Expensive.